Already utilizing the Oracle Cloud EPM Automate utility to automate processes for data loading, launching business rules, and refreshing the database? If so, are you interested in an efficient means of monitoring your automated tasks and receiving updates as to whether or not those tasks were successful?

Great news! You can use the built-in email notification capabilities of Planning to receive updates pertaining to nearly all of your automated jobs. It is easy to setup this functionality and integrate it into your automated processes. Save time by reducing the frequency of logging into your environment and checking job statuses. Now you can receive alerts throughout the key steps of your automation cycle!

Watch the demonstration!

Read the full blog post!

Integrating Email Notifications with EPM Automate Job Tasks

Part 1 of my demonstration featured how to implement email notifications in Planning and Budgeting as a Cloud Service (PBCS). Now, let’s take a look at a more impactful example using EPM Automate to integrate email notifications.

Let’s assume that I have multiple job tasks being launched through a batch script that first calls the EPM Automate utility:

You can tell in the script that there are two key job tasks that we are automating:

Note that we could setup (1) to include a refresh step within the job, but we have made the refresh a separate job task in this particular example to show multiple job tasks in an automation script (for demonstration purposes)

Notice also that I am kicking off the automation login using my credentials – the same used to access Planning and enable email notifications. This is important because the email notifications are sent to the designated person’s email address in Planning (in this case, me – I am effectively logging into the system through the automation and receiving alerts following actions taken through the automation).

In our particular example, the metadata file we want to upload is a CSV file (“Department_Metadata_Import”) with one record:

The import metadata job that was setup through the Job Console is “Import_Department_Metadata” and we are using the same refresh job “RefreshCube”.

Let’s run this script through the command prompt for demonstration purposes:

The command prompt reveals insight into the success/failure of the automated process, but we could receive similar information from the email notifications for each of the job steps (1) and (2).

For (1), we see this email notification indicating success:

But for (2) we see that there was an error:

You can see how useful the email notifications are as opposed to logging in and checking job status through job console or by monitoring within the Command Prompt! If the automation is scheduled, the admin can use their credentials as we have here to receive the email notifications and then take action as necessary.

In our example, we know we have a duplication issue thanks to the email notification. Let’s correct this by updating our file (in this case, loading member “New_Department” with alias “New Business Department” instead of alias “Business Development”, which threw the error originally):

Once we delete the old “New_Department” member from the cube (as well as the metadata import file) and run the automation again with this update, we receive an email notification indicating success as we would want:

And we can confirm success in the Job Console:

And in our Department hierarchy:

In conclusion, email notifications in PBCS are simple to enable and are very useful for monitoring job tasks and resolving errors in automated processes!